Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sea voyages. We have no idea of their shipbuilding skills, but we do know
that they carried only the most primitive stone tool technology with them
from Africa.
This part of the Great Migration was so challenging that few people made
it through. But when those lucky survivors stumbled on the lush estuary of
the Indus, they were home free. The eastern coastline of India, green and
subtropical, stretched away invitingly to the south. It is striking that Mumbai
was home to hippos as recently as 20,000 years ago, even though hippos had
vanished from Iran and Pakistan at least a million years earlier.
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The way was now clear for the descendants of these tough migrants to
spread rapidly. Within a few thousand years some of them made it all the
way to Australia.
The Great Migration was not easy. It posed enormous challenges to the
people who embarked on it, selecting for those who could best survive under
new conditions and who were the best at inventing technologies that would
help their survival. At the end of this long selective process, the people who
arrived in Australia were prepared to tackle one of the most dii cult envi-
ronments that our species has ever faced.
Humans were able to rise to this challenge. But the dii culty of getting to
Australia and surviving once they arrived appears to have been too much for
those more distant relatives of ours who also took the long trek from Africa
almost 2 million years earlier. We will meet some of these earlier peoples,
explore what happened to them, and see how our own species may have
closed of evolutionary paths that might have been available to the earlier
migrants, in our fi nal chapter.
